Guest post for Choices by Dr. Leona Stucky.

The Fog of Faith: Surviving My Impotent God is an historical personal account of a young Mennonite woman who finds herself on the front lines of the Invisible American War.
 
I remember the breathless reaction I had when, years after my war experience, I read in Jeff Wolf Wilson’s book, Children of Battered Women, that during the same years that the US lost 39,000 soldiers in the Vietnam War, 17,500 American women and children were killed by members of their families. 
 
I was shocked.  I had almost become one of those 17,500 women, but if I had to guess, at the moment I read those statistics, I might have thought 500 to 1000 women had been killed in that period.  It would still be devastating that so many women and children had died needlessly - suffered unknown traumas, had often been tormented and tortured perhaps for years before their deaths.  I had been.  My son’s life had been altered by the horrors.
 
It started to soak into my resistant brain.  It wasn’t 500 or a 1000, it was 17,500.  These were the women and children who had been murdered by family members.  Why didn’t I know?

Shame is a powerful emotional force. We are all familiar with shame, yet it often goes unnoticed, unexplored, unchallenged, even by experts. In this blog we will explore the way culture and religion utilize shame to assist humans to become conscious social beings.

Shame invades our internal being. I’m probably writing about it because it invaded me and forever changed my life, as my memoir, The Fog of Faith: Surviving My Impotent God, illustrates.

Perhaps shame builds upon Darwin’s evolution, often in insidious ways. We may be hard wired for it. Parents instill it in their young.

How did shame become a precision power tool to connect internal and external worlds?

It emerged as a consequence of the dynamic relationship between babies and their caregivers. It developed within the internalized representational world of infants as they processed security and rejection from significant loved ones.

Guest Post for Bookworm by Dr. Leona Stucky

Seldom can human evil be fully known before it slashes its wrath across the soft underbelly of human constancy. Evil causes immense suffering and yet it confuses us.

Evil is “gift” that keeps on giving. One patient told me that since terror struck her she thinks double and contradictory thoughts simultaneously. They circumscribe her mental and emotional movements. If danger persists, so does the anguish that surrounds it. The soft underbelly thickens. Evil has to be considered. We guess and re-guess. We are not free to set aside the slashes and live as if they had not happened and will not strike again. We are not free to banish troubling thoughts. They come unbidden. We think and fear them before we can consciously understand or attempt diversions.

Evil eviscerates the safe-harbors of our well-being and leaves scars that won’t allow our soft underbellies to stay placid and playful. We lose our innocence, trauma unfolds, and memory membranes, scattered asunder, must be recollected as if sense can be recreated.

Power struggles often provoke couple or families into therapy, especially when one person wins most of the time. Typically, the more one person wins, the more dysfunctional the couple or family will be. No one likes to lose all the time and winning often comes at the price of damaged relationships.

So I ask each family member, “What does winning mean to you?” Frequently members will say, “It means I get my way. They let me get what I want.”

“Does winning come at a heavy price?” Now they look confused. The ones who seldom win often struggle because the typical winner is a poor loser and will make their winning experience miserable by using resistance tactics or displacing disappointment. Other than that, they aren’t so sure what the price of winning might be. But, to some extent, they have already expressed it. They all felt locked into unsatisfying dynamics, feeling resentful and unhappy, even the winner.

Guest Post for Writers Pay It Forward by Dr. Leona Stucky

Though I’m capable and resourceful, after terror settled into my relationship with Ron, I experienced a no-possible-escape helplessness. As a teen in the 1960s, horrified and completely trapped, I breathed terror. In The Fog of Faith: Surviving My Impotent God, I describe it this way:

Guest Post for C Smash Reads by Dr. Leona Stucky

We looked enough like a normal Midwest farm community that you might not guess we were Mennonite unless you knew our history, motives, thought processes, or noticed our controlled impulses and abundant gentleness. What you couldn’t see revealed the most about us. Underneath our disciplined exterior burned passion. We focused it on doing what Jesus wanted.

Our faith, the well from which we drank our identity, defined what our lives should be. We learned how to judge each event and where to place our trust. We knew another world loomed out there, a bad one that often dismissed our re-purposing of Jesus’s sermon on the mount. My family didn’t touch or taste that world, and seldom did that world intersect ours. Being held in Jesus’s love and resting in His arms was poignant enough for us.

– The Fog of Faith: Surviving My Impotent God